


hypnagogia

by skuls



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-Episode: s11e05 Ghouli, scully isn't technically in it a lot but they do mention her a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 11:45:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13857132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: Prompt:  post-ghouli. william knows scully is his birth mom, but when/how does he figure out mulder is his birth dad? or does he already know?





	hypnagogia

**Author's Note:**

> post ghouli, canon compliant, wrote largely to alleviate the strange influx of dad!mulder feelings i’ve recently been having.

He leaves Virginia and doesn’t look back. He’s always wanted to travel. He lived in Wyoming for a while when he was a baby, but before that, he has no idea. (Something he could ask his birth mother if he hadn’t had to hide from her.) But the rest of his life he’s spent in that tiny town in Virginia, gone on the same vacations to a cabin in the mountains or a beach house on the coast. He’s always wanted to see the country.

His mind is muddled in a way that cannot be cured by staring aimlessly at the interstate. He blasts music, consistently turning up the volume until people in other cars give him dirty looks. When his dad had bought him the car, he’d sat in the passenger seat with Jackson and lectured him for what felt like hours, and one of his stipulations had been that Jackson never turn the volume on the radio up past 30. “I don’t want you distracted and not being able to hear other cars honking at you,” he’d said. Jackson is breaking this rule, and it makes his teeth clench. He can’t think about his father, because that just leads to him thinking about his mother and the way that the three of them were loaded into body bags together and taken to the morgue like some bizarre family photo, mom and dad and baby in the middle. And thinking about that just makes him want to throw up. He can’t think about the morgue, can’t imagine his dead parents or his living birth mother, tears streaking down her face as she apologized to him. He can’t think about it; it’s absolutely dizzying. He drives, squinting at the sun on the horizon.

When he gets to a hotel, a cheap hotel he can pay for with cash, the kindly cashier asks him his name. He thinks without speaking, reverting back to lying completely still in a body bag as he projected. He uses the name that he thinks he must’ve had, once. “William,” he says. “My name is William.”

—

Scully keeps the broken snow globe from Jackson’s room and the strand of hair she cut to check his DNA against hers. Mulder pretends to keep nothing. He has spent this entire ordeal pretending he is strong, being there for Scully, pretending he isn’t shattered inside. He keeps one picture that he doesn’t tell her about: his son at seven or eight, smiling into the camera with a baseball bat in hand. This is for him. His son loves baseball; he’s daydreamed about that more times than he can count. It seems unfair that he wasn’t the one to teach William—Jackson—about baseball: the rules, how to throw, how to catch. It seems unfair that Scully is the one who got to talk to him.

He watches the surveillance tape alongside Scully over and over again, and he smiles every time. When Scully reaches down to take his hand, he squeezes it to communicate his delight for her. He’s extraordinarily happy that she got to talk to their son, to know that he’s okay after seeing him dead, to know that he wants to know her better. He’s so glad to his son is okay, to hear the first words he’s ever heard his son say on the grainy surveillance tape. But he can’t help but be jealous, just a bit. That his son didn’t try to contact him.

He knows it’s selfish, incredibly so, and he can mostly forget about it in the frenzied days after, when Scully is at home with them and they take a few days off work. Watching the tape again and again, whispering excitedly with Scully over the covers about their son, their son who is alive and loves space and Malcolm X and yes, baseball and oh my god, Mulder, he looks just like you. Scully smiles tearily at him and squeezes his hand, and he just loves them both so much. Everything that happened after they lost William, all the nights he found Scully crying hysterically over her son, so worried, so scared that he wasn’t okay and that he won’t resent her and that she hadn’t made him any safer by sending him away. And Mulder is not sure how much safer they made him, but he is alive, and Scully has seen that he is okay. She has spoken to her son for the first time since he was a baby, and she knows he is okay, and that is all that should matter. Mulder has seen the results of her guilt over the years, can still hear her tearful laments in the morgue, and he is so happy that she has some closure, even if it is small. He just. There is something inside him, a weight in his chest that prevents him from being fully happy. The only memories he has of his son, now, are the three days they spent together as an infant and finding him in his bedroom with a bullet wound in his head. The surveillance tape does not count; it is wonderful, but he was not there for that, and it is like the pictures Scully left in the attic when she moved out: something too good to be true, too far off to reach. Like it might shatter on impact if he touches it. He wishes that he’d had a chance to talk to Jackson, even if only briefly. He wishes he’d had a chance to tell his son how much he loves him. He wonders if Jackson knows that he is his father.

He copes. He wraps his arms around Scully when they crawl into bed together, buries his nose in her hair and thinks of their son, thinks of that last night that the three of them spent together, Scully’s eyes red and her head heavy on his shoulder, William nestled against his chest and sucking on his fingers. He’d never wanted to let go. He holds onto Scully and thinks of the picture he has tucked into his bedside table drawer, between the pages of a book he never finished. His son likes baseball. His son.

He has to believe that they will see him again.

—

He is William Smith in West Virginia and William Johnson in Indiana. He realizes that his names are a little less conspicuous than intended by trying to make them more conspicuous, and anyway, he shouldn’t keep using the same alias. He tells the next person who asks that his name is Frank, and it feels bizarre. He wants the comfort of the name his parents gave him, a shouted, “Jack!” down the halls of his school, or the disapproving way his mother said, “Jackson,” right before she laid into him. God, he would do anything to be lectured by her right now. He’d sit through ten lectures if only he could see her again. He swallows back tears and squints at the road ahead.

William is a name he associates with stiff, formal business men or kindly grandfathers. For some reason, whenever he hears the name William, he thinks of that one president who died after, like, only a month in office. He hears his birth mother call him William again in a hushed, tear-soaked voice. He knows it is his birth mother, because he’s seen her a thousand times: in the flashes he gets sometimes, more often of his parents or friends or teachers, but sometimes her. And in that one vision in the heat of his seizure, the vision of the end of the world. And the visions he’d sent her after what had happened on the  _Chimera_ , hoping that she could help him understand why he was the way he was.

He knows that it is her, and he doesn’t know how to feel about it. Didn’t know how to react. Part of him wanted to run to her and demand answers to the questions that he’d had his entire life. The other part wanted to run the other way. His parents were dead because of him, because he decided to contact his birth mother; he couldn’t betray them by talking to her, going with her. And even if it wasn’t a betrayal of everything in his life, he couldn’t put her in danger like that. He’d settled for the best he could do to settle his tossing emotion: talking to her in disguise and then immediately running the other way. He didn’t know what to do. He thinks about contacting her again, just to let her know he’s okay. He remembers his mother and stops. He swallows back the bitterness in his throat and tells the next person his name is Tom Jenkins.

He’s wondered more than once about the man who was with his birth mother. He thinks he might look a little bit like the guy from his vision, the one he thinks is his father, the one his birth mother wanted to save so much. But he can’t be sure. He doesn’t know. His birth father remains a mystery, a foggy figure at the back of his mind with a deep voice, the light overhead haloing his head as he lifts him in the air, an uncertain memory that Jackson can’t place. That is all he recognizes; there are much more solid things concerning his birth mother. But he has thought about him a lot. Tried to get a clear image in his head of him in the vision. He doesn’t know if the man with his birth mother is his birth father—he can’t be sure, he knows law enforcement have partners that aren’t necessarily also life partners—but he thinks he might be. He’d engulfed his birth mother (Scully, Jackson thinks her name is) in his arms after she’d cried over him.  _Your father,_  she had said to him tearfully.  _I’m so sorry I didn’t get a chance to know you, or you get a chance to know me, or your father._

Jackson doesn’t know. He doesn’t. He misses his life in Virginia, his friends and his parents and all of it. He spent all this time wanting to leave, and now he just wants to go home. He curls on his side and pictures his home. The morgue slides into his mind like a knife, his mind blurring into the overhead light of the morgue and the voices of his birth mother and her partner above him. It feels like a memory from when he was very, very young. Like something he barely remembers.

—

Scully has to go home. She needs to check on the house, she tells him apologetically, and she is running out of clothes. Mulder resists the urge to tell her she could just wash them, or finally move back in, instead kisses her softly on the forehead and tells her he’ll miss her. She smiles and tells him that she’ll be back soon.

After she leaves, he sits on the couch and watches TV, tries not to think about everything tangling together in his mind. The surveillance tape sits on top of his TV, dormant. He swallows and ignores it as long as he can.

He breaks eventually, of course. Scully’s voice is not here to fill the quiet moments, and there is nothing to stop him from picturing his son dead. Of course he breaks. He creeps upstairs gingerly, slides the picture out of the book. There’s his son. Smiling under the brim of a baseball cap.

Mulder brushes his thumb over the image of William’s face and lets the tears fall freely.

—

Jackson sees it one night somewhere in Illinois. He’s lying on his stomach facing the TV, watching lazily and thinking absently of the last time he saw this movie (which of course was with Bri, which brings back painful memories) when it flashes through his mind. The man from the morgue, from the hospital, from the end of the world holding a picture of him. He remembers that picture: Little League baseball, and his parents had been so proud, his mom coaxing him to pose with the baseball bat held aloft, grinning into the camera. The man (he thinks his name is Mulder) is holding the picture and crying. He knows this picture, he had to have taken it from his bedroom. The image is gone as quickly as it came, and Jackson gulps, rolling on his back and looking at the water stained ceiling.  _My birth father,_  he thinks, and it feels almost dangerous.  _That’s my birth father._ He thinks he might look like him.

He remembers running into Scully outside of the hospital, just a couple hours after her confession. He’d been hiding around the hospital, uncertain about whether or not to go to his birth mother for help, uncertain about what to do. He’d lingered between Bri and Sarah’s rooms for a few long minutes, weighing whether or not he should go in. He’d hid in a closet for almost an hour, pressing his forehead into his knees. He’d fallen asleep briefly, tried to manipulate dreams.

He’d finally decided to leave, pack a car in case he had to make a quick escape, wait to make sure Sarah and Bri would be okay and then disappear. In the hall on his way out of the hospital, he’d passed the man who he now knows is his birth father, pale and looking on the verge of tears, and he hadn’t thought about it at the time because he’d been so focused on getting out, disguised as  _The Pickup Artist_ guy so that he didn’t recognize him. He hadn’t realized at the time.

Outside the hospital, he’d run smack into Scully, knocking a snow globe out of her hands and onto the ground. When he picked it up to hand it back, he’d recognized it: the one that he’d bought at that gas station an hour outside of town the first time he’d driven that far on his own. She’d taken it from his room. All he could do was apologize in the moment, remembering her tearful apology. It was his snow globe, but he somehow couldn’t be mad at her. She’d felt such a connection to him, been so saddened by his apparent death that she’d taken something from his bedroom to hold onto him. And now he knew that his birth father had done the same thing.

He’s talked to his birth mother, twice now. He’s sent her dreams and visions and seen her in his head for years. But he has nothing of his birth father but the foggy memory of being lifted towards the light, the knowledge that he will die if the world ends and he doesn’t get stem cells from Jackson. Another parent dead, and it will be his fault like his other parents, because he is the only one who can save him.

Jackson rolls back on his stomach, pressing his face into the blankets. He doesn’t know what to do. He wishes he knew what to do.

He can’t go back and find them. It’s too soon, he’s not ready for that. He’ll head back at the first sign of the end of the world, but not now. Not yet. But he can’t leave it like this between him and the birth father he’s never met. He never even spoke to him, never got a chance to tell him what he told his birth mother. And Mulder is the one he will lose if he fails.

When he was asleep in the closet in the hospital, he’d sent a dream to Scully, trying to reassure her, show her that he was okay. He’d wanted to talk to her, had come up behind her while she was looking at the unbroken snow globe. She had turned to look at him as he prepared to speak, but then she’d woken up and he’d been ready to forget the entire thing. Until he ran into her outside of the hospital.

He can do the same thing. He can send Mulder a dream, and hope that he doesn’t wake up before they have a chance to talk. It’s the best he can do, for now.

Jackson rolls onto his side and shuts his eyes.

—

Mulder doesn’t remember falling asleep. He just knows that when he opens his eyes, he is lying is a strange hotel room, shabby and cheap. The photo is on the bedside table. When Mulder tries to move, reach for the picture, roll over and scan his surroundings, he finds that he can’t. He is trapped, immobile in the bed. His throat goes dry as he remembers: sleep paralysis. The dreams their son sent Scully.

He tries to move, but he is still frozen. He grunts in protest as he struggles. A dark figure appears over his shoulder, skinny and gangly. His breath catches in his throat. “William?” he whispers, helpless.

He isn’t expecting him to speak, which is why the voice coming from over his shoulder is such a surprise. “You’re him, aren’t you?” Jackson says. “My birth father.”

Mulder finds himself able to move in that moment; he immediately turns over, eagerly. His son stands next to the bed, dressed in an oversized shirt and jacket that look like they’re from Goodwill. He looks terrified, dark hair hanging in his face. “Jackson,” Mulder says, a bit stilted, as he sits up; he knows he is as nervous as his son. “I… yes. I’m your birth father.”

Jackson nods a little frantically, dark eyes huge in his face. “I thought you might be,” he says. “But I knew for sure when I saw you with the picture.” He motions to the picture on the bedside table.

Mulder swallows. “I… I’ve always loved baseball,” he says quietly. “I dunno, I just…”

“Yeah.” Jackson nods quickly, his hands fisted by his side. “I get it.”

Mulder swallows again. He doesn’t know what to say. He wants to hug his son. He wants to beg him to come back. He says, “Are you okay?” Jackson nods. Mulder’s eyes flick over the suitcase in the corner, the pile of personal belongings on the table. He tries, “Where are you?”

Jackson shakes his head. “Can’t tell you. I just want you to know that… I dunno, I’m okay, I guess,” he says, shrugging. “I never got a chance to… talk to you. But you can’t come looking for me. It’s not safe.”

Mulder nods, as much as he hates it. This is his and Scully’s son; he’s not surprised that William is trying to distance himself. “I appreciate you contacting me,” he says, and his voice only falters a little, as if this isn’t the only conversation he’s ever had with his son. “We were worried about you.”

“I’m sorry I made you think I was dead,” Jackson blurts.

“It’s okay,” Mulder replies too quickly. He holds up his hands, trying to calm him, and thinks helplessly of the first time he tried to soothe his son. Hey now, none of that. “It’s okay,” he says. “You did it to keep yourself safe. I’m just glad you’re okay. Scully feels the same way.”

Jackson looks away, down at the ground. Mulder feels the world narrow, the edge of the image fade. “I can’t come back right now,” he mumbles. “But I’m going to come back someday. So I can save you. So I can get to know you better.”

Tears prick the edge of Mulder’s vision. The dream is fading, he’s starting to wake up. “Jackson,” he says, a plea, a thank-you.

“Tell…” Jackson trails off, gulping. “Tell Scully I said hi. Tell her I’ll be okay.”

His son’s face is fading. Mulder, he hears someone say, far away, but he tries to ignore it, tries to cling to his reality. “William,” he says, slipping up. He doesn’t want to leave. Jackson begins to fade out. He means to say _I love you_ , but what actually comes out is, “I’m so sorry.”

“Mulder?” Scully says from somewhere above him, and his eyes slip open. His son’s voice still in his ears.

Scully is standing above him, her hair pulled back and an overnight bag in one hand. Her eyes aren’t on him but on his hand, and he remembers that he fell asleep with the picture in hand. William’s face, slightly crumpled, is just visible over the top of his fingers.

Scully sits on the edge of the bed and reaches for his hand. “You kept the picture,” she says softly, taking it from him. Her finger brushes over the glossy image.

Mulder smiles, sitting up on the bed. He takes her hand, crushing the picture between their palms. It’s all they have for now, but it won’t be forever. Jackson said he was coming back someday. “Scully,” he says, brushing loose strands of hair out of her face. She looks up at him tremulously, lower lip trembling. He brushes his fingers over her jaw, coming down to cup her cheek. “Jackson says hi,” he says.


End file.
